Watch Photo Slideshow on TV

Sharing your photos with family and friends is always fun, but crowding around the computer's small screen is not. A good way is to create a photo slideshow with your photos and burn it onto DVD, then you can watch your DVD slideshow on a TV in the comfort of your living room, with its multi-album feature, you can just kick back with the remote control to enjoy the whole fun.

Photo DVD Maker can help you easily creating photo slideshow and let you watch it on TV.

Answers

The aspect ratio of an image is its width divided by its height. Two common video graphic aspect ratios are:

4:3 (1.33:1): universal for standard-definition video formats

16:9 (1.78:1): universal to high-definition television and European digital television

Cropping

Cropping refers to the removal of the outer parts of an image to improve framing, accentuate subject matter or change aspect ratio.

TV screen's physical aspect ratio and the video’s aspect ratio may not necessarily be the same. In certain circumstances, pictures/videos may be cropped to change from one aspect ratio to another, without stretching the image or filling the blank spaces with letterbox bars.

Since the advent of widescreen television, a similar process removes large chunks from the top & bottom to make a standard 4:3 image fit a 16:9 one, losing 25% of the original image.

TV cropping in Photo DVD Maker

In the case of displaying picture slideshows on TV screen, most of the pictures will be cropped about 5%, on the edges of the pictures. Photo DVD Maker supports TV cropping from 0% to 25%. The default setting is 5%, if the TV cropping is enabled.

If you got widescreen LCD TV, cropping is not necessary. You can de-select the TV Cropping option

In the “Burn Disc” tab, click the “TV System” sub-tab, and you will see the “TV Cropping” option and setting. Once the “Enable cropping” option is selected, you can drag the slide bar to increase or decrease the percentage of cropping.

I don’t like some pictures being cropped. Is there a solution?

Sure. If you do not like some pictures being cropped on edges due to aspect ratio conversion, please set the "Photo Scale Option" to "Scale to Fit" and choose the right Aspect Ratio for your TV.

There are black bars around photos when the slideshow playback. Why?

When you transfer widescreen pictures to video formats while preserving the original aspect ratio, the so-called black bars appear.

There two types of black bars: Pillarboxing and Windowboxing.

Pillarboxing is the display of an image within a wider image frame wider by adding lateral mattes; for example, a 4:3 image has lateral mattes when displayed on a 16:9 aspect ratio television screen.

A pillarboxed image: displaying 4:3 picture in 16:9 screen

Windowboxing occurs when an image appears centered in a television screen, with blank space on all four sides of the image, such as when a widescreen image that has been previously letterboxed to fit 4:3 is then pillarboxed to fit 16:9.

A windowboxed image

Why there is no transition effects when the slideshow playbacks on TV?

If you burn the slideshow to VCD 2.0, then there will be no transition effects. VCD 2.0 is best for recording still images, with high resolution, great compatibility with most DVD players, but no transition effects or background music can be used with VCD 2.0 format.

Why are some photos much smaller than they should be when playback on TV?

Aspect ratio and standard resolution

How to improve the picture quality of the slideshow?

The picture quality of slideshow is determined by a combination of various factors. You may have to trade one thing to get others.

To get better slideshow quality, you can:

Choose high quality pictures for making slideshows. This is the most essential and critical measure.